Stock footage, or archive footage as it is sometimes called, is basically video of a location that is not taken for a specific production, but is instead cataloged in a studio's stock footage library to be used on an as-needed basis. Footage that has actually been used in a specific production can also wind up in a stock footage library, as is the case with the Ghostbusters films. Using stock footage is much cheaper for a production than actually sending a crew out to shoot establishing shots of each different locale needed for a particular show or movie.
To give you a real example of the concept, take a look at this shot of a red brick house. Can you guess what television show this was filmed for?
If you guessed
The King of Queens, you're dead wrong. Although
this shot of this particular house may be well known from its use over nine seasons as the Heffernan's house, it was actually filmed in 1991 (seven years before
The King of Queens premiered) for a little-known television series called
Sibs starring Jami Gertz and Dan "Homer Simpson" Castellaneta. Not a single person on the
The King of Queens production staff
even knew where the house was until a fan did an
exhausting amount of research.
The King of Queens production staff just simply pulled footage of this house from the Sony Pictures stock footage library and that's how it came to be known as the Heffernan House. It even appears on
many of the DVD boxes!
As expected, Sony has footage from both Ghostbusters movies in their stock footage library, and I have cataloged it to the best of my ability on the new
Ghostbusters stock footage and
Ghostbusters II stock footage pages here on Spook Central. What you'll find are different takes and camera angles of various shots and scenes, almost all in their original uncut form. What you won't find is footage of the actors or anything that couldn't be passed off as "generic" footage.
We've already had our first instance of Ghostbusters footage appearing in another production when I spotted this digitally-altered shot in the Monk episode "Mr. Monk and the Voodoo Curse" a few years ago:
There's a little bit of unused footage from a few scenes, and even some footage from deleted scenes, amongst all of the stock footage. All of the deleted scene footage is listed at the bottom of each page. Here are some unused Ectomobile shots from both films, and the exterior of the Parkview Hospital from the second film (where we would have met Sherman Tully), to whet your appetite. (In the third shot, you can see the top of the Ecto-1A at the bottom of the shot, and the front of the car reflected in the window.)